


pick myself up piece by piece

by lettersfromnowhere



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies)
Genre: (why is that a thing?), Angst, F/M, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), conversations with objects belonging to deceased loved ones, it might become a fix-it but I'm honestly not sure, the most blatantly emotionally manipulative thing I've ever written, this is what happens when I write 2948 fluffy oneshots in a row, well this is depressing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-08
Updated: 2019-01-09
Packaged: 2019-10-06 14:34:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17346977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lettersfromnowhere/pseuds/lettersfromnowhere
Summary: Living, Gamora supposes, is better than dying, but it's just as heavy a burden.(The "what if Gamora was brought back before the people who died in the snap [@Peter]?" fic that none of us need right now, because I STILL have unprocessed IW feels.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is relentlessly depressing. Sorry. Honestly not even sure where it came from, it just...happened. This is a two-parter, though. I'll *probably* add a less depressing chapter, but who knows? 
> 
> I feel like all of my IW angst oneshots are from Peter's perspective (except the semi fix-it, which was from Mantis' POV) so here's an attempt at writing Gamora that likely falls totally flat but I don't care because I made myself depresso espresso while writing this and that is all that matters.
> 
> Also, this subscribes to the headcanon that Carol (Captain Marvel) rescues the Stranded-in-Space Squad (Nebula and Tony Stark) and brings them back to Earth to meet up with the rest of the Avengers, wherever they are (do we know? I don't think so?), if that didn't make sense in the actual story.

Everything seemed blurry, the first few days. Even knit back together her body felt broken, her mind even moreso. Every inch of her cried out with loss she couldn’t afford to show, and she was painfully, acutely aware that everyone could see it.

 

She couldn’t help but hear. “Give her time. She can’t process this,” said the tiny leather-clad redhead to their leader.

 

“I can’t even imagine…”

 

“She just looks so numb.”

 

She quietly went about the compound, her head down, pretending she didn't hear them and perpetually biting back a lifetime’s worth of unshed tears. This was all _wrong._ That wrongness, deep and numbing, was all she could feel; she couldn't shake the sense that it shouldn’t have been her, that her life, revived as quickly as it had ended, wasn’t worth the price of all those they left behind. And everywhere she was met with terrified pity, smothering and isolating all at once. Oftentimes she simply retreated to her quarters and sat, staring at the room’s blank walls, too overwhelmed with sorrow and grief and the inescapable, ever-present pain in her still-healing bones to do anything but stare into the nothingness.

 

Then they came.

 

They’d been stranded in space, their teammates said. There were three – the barely-living man and the woman whose every surface glowed with energy and her sister. They hadn’t thought they’d make it back. And for a moment, desperate for the sight of a familiar face, she nearly ran into her sister’s arms and let out the all desperation she’d had to shelter from her concerned rescuers (teammates, they insisted, but she knew she could never truly call them her equals, not with the debt she owed). Nebula seemed to sense it but she moved first.

“I thought you might…want this back,” she said numbly, placing a cool metal object in her hands. Gamora didn’t want to look down. Noticing her sister’s shellshocked reticence, she added, “If you don’t want it, you don’t have to take it.”

 

She glanced down at the red-eyed mask in her hands and back up at her sister and down at the mask again, and she shook her head jerkily. “No,” she mumbled. The exhausted man and the glowing woman and all of their comrades who’d come to greet them froze. They hadn’t heard her speak in days and now, clutching the mask to her chest like driftwood in a shipwreck, she broke her silence. “Thank you.”

 

She turned to retreat to her quarters and now, even in partial view of the people from whom she’d sworn to conceal her brokenness, she couldn’t help but let out her tears. She shut the door to her room methodically and sat on the edge of her bed for a moment, stroking the mask’s familiar lines.

 

“Why, Peter?” she asked, hushed, afraid her voice would break with sobs if she raised it above a whisper. “Why _you?”_

 

In the whirlwind of her mind, she’d half-hoped his voice would answer her. She knew even then that the notion was beyond logic, but holding what used to be a part of him, it felt as if he almost could’ve been there – _almost,_ but just couldn’t.

 

“I know you would’ve wanted them to save me, but I wish it had been you.” She watched a single tear trace its way down the delicate grooves of the mask, tracing its edges. “They thought I was more ‘useful.’ That if they could bring me back first, I’d know how to reverse the Decimation. But…” she trailed off, still somehow waiting for a response that she knew would never come. “I don’t have anything you don’t. I don’t know how to save you. That’s the reason I’m alive, talking to you” – she closed her eyes, trying not to let herself imagine him here, in her arms where he belonged – “and I can’t do it. Everyone…pities me. Because I don’t know how, or maybe because they know I can’t pretend that this was all a nightmare like they all do.”

 

 _Breathe,_ she tried to tell herself, but there was no point. She’d long accepted that she wasn’t going to piece herself back together in time, no matter how badly she was needed. Ignoring the events of the past days only made it clearer; concrete memories, pushed to the back of her mind, became an ominous, anonymous _something,_ haunting her in darkness even after she’d taken it from the daylight. And the sight of all that was left of the man she’d loved brought every moment back to mind, and the cloud following her around burst into torrential rain.

 

“I regret _everything_ , you know,” she whispered. “I regret that I don’t know what I’m doing. I regret that I can’t save you, and the others, and everyone else we could have kept alive if we’d just…if…” she bowed her head. “And I don’t want to think about what’s going to happen if I never figure it all out.”

 

She knew she’d never hear the comfort of a human voice – _his_ voice – but she needed to see something that was alive, and present, and here in this moment that felt like a solitary eternity. So she gently pressed the side of the mask, letting its red eye sockets light up, trying to feel as if there was something more than an inanimate lump of metal in her hands. Tucking her feet under herself on the bed, she leaned back against the wall behind her bed.

 

“I’m sorry.”

 

Watching her tears fall against a spare white bedspread, Gamora pressed the mask against her cheek, trying not to notice cold metal in place of something warm and human and alive. “I must look crazy,” she muttered. “I’m talking to a mask. And I don’t even know if I care anymore.” _It isn’t as if anyone here would understand more than an inanimate object would,_ she almost added. _Nebula, maybe, or Rocket, but they’re no better off than I am._ She shifted to lean against the cool metal backboard of the bed, letting the mask drop into her lap as she closed her eyes.

 

Perhaps, if she could shut out the world for long enough, she could forget that nearly all she loved had been taken from it. Perhaps she could feel, for a moment, as if she were not entirely on her own.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fix-it, sort of. This makes no sense.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wasn't kidding when I said that this makes no sense. But hey, fix-it ending!

Peter opened his eyes blearily, unsure where he was or why he was there. For a moment he lay there, remembering nothing, forgetting nothing, until everything came crashing down over him and all he could think about was _her_ and he had to know, would _die_ all over again if he didn’t, what became of her. So he searched the compound, orders to rest soundly ignored, to find the one person who could tell him.

 

“Where is Gamora?” his eyes were bloodshot, exhaustion mingling openly with anxiety. “Is she-“

 

“She’s in the temporary quarters on the east side. Physically, she’s fine.” Nebula glanced off into the distance. “Mentally, less so.”

 

“Take me to her.”

“Quill, that’s…not a good idea right now. For either of you.” Nebula couldn’t look at him.

 

Peter gritted his teeth, grabbing the nearest object (an oversized plasma television, the likes of which he’d never seen) for stability. “Take me. To. Gamora.”

 

“It’s going to be hard on you,” Nebula warned. “And on her. She’s been in some sort of shock for weeks now.”

 

“W… _weeks?”_ Peter stammered, blanching. “She’s been…back…for _weeks?”_

Nebula nodded curtly, leading him down a hall. “I told you she wasn’t taking it well. It’s been two weeks and she’s done almost nothing but stare at the walls.”

 

She wasn’t one for overwrought emotion – not now, not ever. But even so, she wouldn’t look Peter in the eye; she didn’t need to see the proof of the grief she knew he felt. “Her room is…somewhere around here,” Nebula muttered, desperate to break the silence even for the most trivial reason.

 

“Thanks,” Peter replied numbly, staring at the ground ahead of him.

 

“Quill?”

 

“Yeah?” Peter managed the briefest of glances at her.

 

“Be careful. She might not even believe you’re not a hallucination at first.” Nebula turned down a corridor, stopping in front of an unmarked door that, though it looked like every other door in the compound, was so familiar as to stand out.

 

She turned and left on silent feet, and for a moment, Peter simply stood in front of the door, unsure whether to open it or turn and go. _Open it already,_ his brain dictated, and he turned the knob, silently opening the door a crack.

 

“Yes?” Gamora called from inside, her voice taut and pained. It was all Peter could do not to burst through the door and fling himself at her begging her never to let go, but even like this he knew better.

 

“It’s me,” he called, softly, nudging the door open just enough to slip inside. She whirled around, as close to slack-jawed as he’d ever seen her. She looked to an object in her hands, then to him, then to the floor, utterly bewildered.

 

“ _Peter_?”

 

He nodded, biting back a lump in his throat along with the urge to take her into his arms on sight. “Yeah.”

 

“Peter,” she breathed, relief nearly drowned out by disbelief. “How…”

 

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “May I…” he gestured to the straight-backed chair in the corner of her room.

 

 

Gamora looked up at him for the first time, her eyes rimmed with red. She nodded timidly. “It isn’t as if you have to ask,” she said.

 

“I…don’t want to startle you,” he offered lamely.

 

“I’ve spent two weeks thinking that this moment wouldn’t come.” She dropped her eyes to the bedspread. “Right now, I don’t want anything but you.”

 

“Okay.” Peter took a seat next to her, sitting for a moment before she leaned to rest her head on his shoulder. He could feel her tears fall against his battered jacket and, tentatively, he reached out and wrapped his arms around her, feeling her weight resting against him (too little of it – he had a sinking feeling she’d neglected to eat these past days). “I’m sorry,” he mumbled, pressing his cheek against her hair. “I’m sorry. I’m so, so-“

 

“Stop apologizing,” she said, muffled against his jacket. “None of what happened is your fault.”

  
“That doesn’t mean I’m not sorry that it happened.”

  
His own tears began to fall and they sat in silence, for there were no words into which to put their feelings anymore. They’d been through too much to eloquently summarize, but neither wanted or needed to. Simply being in each other’s presence – such a simple thing, and yet so recently an impossibility – was enough. The whole world had been restored but in this moment, to each of them, only a single person in seven billion mattered. Living in a moment that once seemed to be no more than a dream, there was nothing left now but to hold each other and let out everything they’d had to hold in for so long, and to hope against hope that in all their days they’d never be torn from each other this way again.

 

Peter was the first to break the silence. Craning his sore neck – he’d never have allowed himself to be compelled to admit it but their position was less than ideal –  he couldn’t help but notice the object lying on a nightstand by the opposite corner of the bed. “Is that my mask?” he asked, puzzled as to how it had come to be in her possession.

 

“Oh. Yes, it is.” Gamora reached for the nightstand, grasping at air until her hand found the mask and handing it to him. “Nebula gave it to me. She…thought it might be comforting for me to have it.”  

 

“Was it?” he asked, hoping that he wouldn’t overstep.

 

“A little bit.” Gamora wouldn’t look at him. “I suppose it was nice to have a part of you with me, but it made me miss you more.”

 

He didn’t need to say anything. Anything he would have said, after all, she could sense: _I’m here. I’m real. I’m never letting this happen to you again._

A promise held little weight in the world they lived in, one where there was never a guarantee – no matter how good the intention – that it would or could be kept. Neither knew what the future held, whether they would ever be able to keep a promise when reality itself was hardly real half the time. But those were bridges to be crossed later.

 

But for as long as they could remain this way – the only two inhabitants of their worlds, impervious to all else – a promise made was a promise kept.  

**Author's Note:**

> I'm pretty sure Peter's mask got ashed along with the rest of his body, but it's much more heartrending to imagine that it survived and Nebula brought it back to Gamora as a reminder of her lost love. In other news, why do us fandom people have such a deep desire to make ourselves sad on a regular basis? That CAN'T be healthy...


End file.
